Introductory Comments - UK Research Careers Must Swap Pinch Points for Portfolios

The UK Government’s Department for Innovation Universities and Skills (DIUS) has a real concern that research careers are not always perceived to be attractive by the best graduates. This concern led to DIUS to ask Professor Thrift to examine whether this is the case and if so what might be done to improve matters

Pass it on: towards a political economy of propensity

The paper argues that the work of Gabriel Tarde on imitation provides a fertile means of understanding how capitalism is forging a new affective technology which conforms to a logic of propensity rather than to means-end reasoning. This it does by drawing together a biological understanding of semiconscious cognition with various practical geometric arts so as to re-stage the world as a series of susceptible situations which can be ridden rather than rigidly controlled. The paper examines the advent of technologies which attend to the variable geometry of so-called animal spirits in the realm of business and then, using Tarde's work as a springboard, considers some alternative means of understanding imitative rays which have less instrumental undertones. The paper is an illustration of the way in which biology and culture have increasingly become intertwined

Different atmospheres : of Sloterdijk, China, and site

This paper begins with an appreciation and critique of the remarkable work of Peter Sloterdijk which makes it possible to open up a number of issues concerning philosophy and its relation to the social sciences and humanities, most particularly concerning the role of evidence and the pervasiveness of Eurocentrism. In particular, the paper argues that it is possible to think of different ways of raising the spectre of space which are as plausible as the account provided by Sloterdijk’s spatial philosophy/philosophy of space. Navigating by the compass of classical Chinese civilisation, I proceed to sketch out a different diagnosis from that of Sloterdijk of how space is being materialised in contemporary Euro-American cultures. Drawing on logographic traditions of writing the world, I argue that, rather than describing what is now being produced by capitalism and other actors as a warehoused world full of lost souls, it is possible to think of different means of describing how the future is being scripted

An alternative regional strategy

Regions, this extract suggests, cannot bring about regional inequality without significant national level action. The key, it is claimed, is a ‘national commitment to decentre the economy’. As well as re-examining some current regional policy – such as whether knowledge transfer needs to happen locally or how foreign investment might be better harnessed – this manifesto argues that national policy needs to be made far more sensitive to the regional agenda